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My brother explained football to me when we were watching it on a wide screen at my aunt and uncle’s house in Santa Monica. My brother teaches 6th grade, so he did a really good job even though I am an idiot.

Here is what I now know:

They all line up. Red team and Purple team. Red has the ball. The football, which the game is named after.

The whistle blows. The Red guy who only has one job, which is to do this, “hikes” the ball behind himself. He has his butt in the air, and the ball has to pass between his legs. He is wearing spandex capri pants, or, “Clam Diggers.”

The QB gets the ball, and now it’s really Go Time. He has to “set up the play.” Like James Van der Beek in the 1999 MTV film, Varsity Blues. Van der Beek is the QB. It means Quarter Back. It means that women love you and wear whipped cream bikinis for you. It means that later your career will really go down the toilet post-Rules of Attraction but my brother will continue to emulate your middle-parted hairstyle (aka “The Butt Cut”) well into his college years. It means A HERO. Okay. (Me: “What if he drops it?” My Brother: “He sucks.”)

What happens next happens in truly about 2-10 seconds. If you wear glasses usually but are not wearing them now, forget it. If you’re prone to sort of zoning out at pivotal moments when important facts are repeated for the only time during movies that have actual plots (why do I do that? seriously. seriously. why?), forget it.

Basically, the kind of burst of hormone-crazed adrenaline that certain moms are maybe-apocryphally have said to have reacted with in response to infants trapped beneath cars, etc., is happening in all of the dudes on the field, Team Red AND Team Purple, and it looks like this: